


Low and Outside

by FabulaRasa



Category: Numb3rs
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-02-09
Updated: 2010-02-09
Packaged: 2017-10-07 03:36:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,357
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/61010
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FabulaRasa/pseuds/FabulaRasa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Memories of the biggest mistake Don ever made keep intruding on his life. But like the bad pitches, Don just can't lay off the memories.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Low and Outside

**I.**

Those were the pitches he could never lay off: the low and outside.

Charlie had reminded him of that, in the middle of the sniper case, and even at the time, in the middle of everything else going on, he had thought, for a shave of a second—how weird. Weird that Charlie would remember something like that, that Charlie had known that much about his game, when for all he knew—for all he remembered—Charlie had never shown the slightest interest in baseball, had only attended his games under duress. Sixteen years old and the star of the field, his parents in the stands, the whole school screaming his name: Don. Don. Don. Blue and yellow pennants fluttering. And his eleven-year-old kid brother sitting up there in the bleachers, by himself the way he always sat, thoughtful head bent over a yellow legal pad, scribbling numbers and equations, lost in his own universe. Frankly, he was surprised Charlie even knew what a low and outside pitch was.

* * *

"This guy is a freak," he said to Charlie.

They were hand-drying the dishes, because they had used Mom's china the way Dad liked to do on Fridays, and Dad didn't like to put them in the dishwasher. "It'll chip them," he always said, though the dishwasher had never chipped any of their other things.

Charlie made a noise between a snort and a grunt, and Don frowned at him. "What, you don't believe me? You oughta see some of these pictures. Believe me, you don't want anywhere near this case. Besides, if there were a math angle to be worked, you don't think I would bring you in? I'd bring you in in a heartbeat, you know I would."

Charlie made another snorting noise, low enough to be ignored. "You don't want any part of it," Don continued. "Besides, you've got your own stuff going on right now anyway. Larry said that your article was in the final stages of peer review, and that in the next week you would probably be needing to, you know, revise and stuff, and—"

"_Larry_ said," Charlie grunted.

"Yeah, Larry said. Something the matter? You've been like this all night, everything I say you just roll your eyes and make that noise in the back of your throat."

Charlie wrung out the damp towel. "I do not make a noise."

"You do, you have a noise you make. It's a noise that means, I can't believe how stupid and annoying you are and I'm not going to actually waste words on you. You've made it since you were like, two and a half."

That got a whuff of a bitten-back laugh from Charlie, and Don grinned. "Hey," he said, pressing his momentary opening. He didn't like it when Charlie got this way, because it was unfixable. No one fixed Charlie. Charlie fixed himself, or he didn't; no one else could find the manual. "Hey, I'm not shutting you out of this case, if that's why you're pissed at me. Like I said, the math angle—"

"Math angle," Charlie repeated. "There is no math _angle_. Mathematics is not some scam I run in my spare time, Don. Math isn't an angle, it's everything. Every case that you work, every variable you weigh, every step you take, every—the rate of your _inhalation_, for God's sake, the trajectory of—look, you want to compartmentalize math so it's something you don't have to think about, just like you want to compartmentalize me, and Dad, and everything that isn't work, because work is real, and everything else, even if that everything else happens to be the functioning blueprint of the universe, well, that's just some angle, some _thing_ off over there that doesn't really have anything to do with you."

"Whoa," Don said. He put his towel down and took in Charlie, standing at the sink with his hands on his hips. Speaking of the rate of inhalation, Charlie's was quite a bit accelerated. He was actually pissed. "Whoa, hang on. Look, if you want, I'm happy for you to have a look at the case—you think I'm trying to keep it from you? Charlie, I would never do that, and hell, maybe there's some angle—" he caught himself—"maybe there's some variables I'm not taking into account, right, so yeah, by all means, I want you to take a look if you want to, sure."

Charlie sighed. He rubbed at his forehead, a stray curl bobbing behind his ear. "Sorry," he said after a minute. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to—take your head off like that. I just thought. . . well. I thought maybe you were trying to protect me or some idiotic thing like that, like maybe Dad had given you the whole speech again, and. . ." He waved his hand. "Sorry. Just. . . ignore me."

"'S okay," Don said, and squeezed his arm. "Hey, let's finish up, and then take a look at this case file. But seriously, I am warning you. These pics are not easy to look at, even for me, and I deal with freaks on a regular basis. This guy—I mean, he is the genuine article, all right?"

Just like that, something shifted behind Charlie's eyes again, and his arms were crossed in front of him. "Freaks," Charlie said. "Right. That a professional term? The profilers teach you that?"

"Hey, back off. Trust me, some guys are actually freaks, and this perp, he's one of them."

Charlie gave the snort again. "Uh huh. Look, you wouldn't—" He broke off, turned back to the sink. "Okay, just forget it. Just—let's get these dishes finished."

"I wouldn't what?" Don was irritated now. "What were you gonna say, I wouldn't what?"

"You wouldn't know a genuine freak if you met him on the street, is what I was going to say. Happy? Because what the hell would you know about being an actual freak." He reached for another of the dishes dripping in the rack, too quickly, and it slipped between his fingers into the sink. It broke with a clatter against the side of the sink, into three pieces. Charlie stared at it in horror. "Fuck," he breathed. "Fuck, Dad's gonna—ah, hell."

He slammed his towel down on the counter and walked away, and Don stood staring at the sink, and the broken plate, feeling like Charlie had just scrawled a string of equations on the board and walked out, and he was left staring at them, an incomprehensible string in a language he really ought to have learned by now.

He finished up by himself in the kitchen, and cleaned up the broken pieces of the plate and wrapped them in paper towel, and turned off the lights. He went into the living room, but Charlie wasn't there. He hadn't expected him to be. Don grabbed his jacket and headed out the door, and he didn't turn the radio on during the short drive back to his apartment, because he needed to think. He played and re-played their conversation in his head, and after a while the equation started to come clear. Sometimes Charlie wanted not to feel like a freak.

Don wondered how often Charlie had heard that word aimed at him, when he was a kid, and the thought made him want to go find every shitty snot-nosed mouth-breathing brat who had ever hurt Charlie in any way, who had ever even looked at him wrong, and beat them until they fucking bled.

* * *

When Charlie appeared at his office with a sandwich the next day, Don knew that was his apology, on rye, and he took it.

"So I took a look at the case file," Charlie said around a mouthful of pastrami.

"Yeah?"

"You're right, I got nothing."

Don aimed a balled-up napkin at his head. "You're fired."

"You can't fire me, I'm like, the FBI field office mascot. Seriously, I did look. I mean, I'll look again, but I'm not sure that—"

"Don," David said, sticking his head around the corner. "I put those other files you asked for on Terry's desk. If it helps. Hey, Charlie."

"Hey, David, what's up."

Then David's head was gone, and Charlie was intent on Don again. "So I confessed to Dad about the plate, and you wanna know what he said?"

"Do I?"

"He said, that's okay, I never actually liked those plates anyway. And then he said, what do we need a set of eight for anyway?" Charlie leaned back, crunching on a potato chip, as if he had just proved his point.

"He should have taken it out of your allowance."

"Yeah," Charlie said absently. "Hey, did you ever have one of those?"

"One of what."

"An allowance. Did Mom and Dad ever give you one? Because they never gave me one. I mean, they generally let me have whatever I wanted, but once when I asked about chores around the house—I don't know, I guess I must have heard some other kids talking about an allowance, and it seemed like a cool thing, I don't know—once when I asked, Mom said that I had enough to worry about with my advanced schoolwork and my equations and stuff, and that I didn't need to worry about things like that. So I always wondered, did you get one?"

"Yeah," Don said thoughtfully, munching on a chip. "I got one."

"Oh yeah? What for? I mean, what did you have to do?"

"I don't remember. Take out the trash, maybe?"

Charlie nodded, and took another bite of his sandwich, and Don stared off into the distance, keeping his gaze off Charlie, because no way in hell was he going to say: _I got my allowance for hanging out with you. _

* * *

"You're not a freak," Don began.

It was the following Friday, and they were in the kitchen again. Dad had gone to bed early, like he did these days, and that was a whole other set of things to worry about, but right now, he had Charlie to worry about. He had been thinking about what he was going to say all week. "You hear me? You're not a freak. You never were. I should never have used that word, the other day. You are not a freak."

The thing shifted behind Charlie's eyes again. They were sitting at the kitchen table over their coffee, listening to the low hum of the dishwasher, because maybe that was less hazardous to the plates than having Charlie wash the dishes. "Don," he said with a sigh.

"I'm serious. I want you to hear me. I don't like what you said about yourself, I don't like you thinking that. You're not a freak."

"Don," Charlie said again, in what sounded like a tone of warning.

"I mean it."

"Oh, you do."

"I do."

"Don," Charlie sighed. "You have no clue." Charlie's eyes were level and dark. "You have not even the first idea. Your mind could not begin to comprehend, what kind of a freak I am."

"What, because I'm too stupid to understand?"

"Shut the fuck up." Don almost flinched at that, because Charlie never swore. Not like that, anyway, not in that way. "Just shut up, all right? You don't like me saying freak, I don't like you saying stupid. Not about yourself. When I said you couldn't understand, I just meant, you're a good person, is all. You're—you're decent. You wouldn't understand because you're a better person than I am. You're not. . . well."

Don stirred his coffee. He didn't take anything in it, but he liked the ritual of the spoon. "Charlie. I'm not a better person than you are. Everybody has things about themselves they don't like. Doesn't make you not a good person. You're a good person."

"Oh, really."

"Yes, really. Look, I know you, all right? I know you pretty well, and I can tell you, you're a good person. Trust me, I've had some experience with this kind of thing." He smiled as he sipped at his coffee, but Charlie didn't smile back.

"You know me pretty well, huh."

"Yes. I think it's fair to say I do."

"Mm," Charlie replied, thoughtfully. "The name of the person I slept with last night was Jonas Moakwright. He's a former grad student, but he dropped out of the program two years ago. He's got some sad desperate job doing data analysis at some company now, and some sad little apartment with those irritating Escher prints and ugly carpet. I go over there sometimes and let him suck me off, when I feel like I need it. It probably makes him feel like someone in the program still cares about him, and sometimes I pretend to be interested in his equations, which are also sad and mediocre, like everything in Jonas's life. But he gives fantastic head, and I can leave after he falls asleep. Sometimes I leave before." Charlie took a sip of his coffee.

There was only the whirr and whoosh of the dishwasher in the room. Don's eyes flicked to the sink, and back again. He kept his face as still as he knew how, and he knew how. The thing to do was to show nothing. "Being gay does not make you a freak," he said at last, and slowly.

"It does in your world."

"You don't live in my world."

"I've never lived anywhere else."

Don held even stiller. Charlie's anger was like a physical thing, rolling across the table at him. So angry, all these years, and he had never known. "In the world where I live," Don said, keeping his voice as slow as possible, "my brother is a good and decent person. Maybe the best person I know. Who he likes to sleep with doesn't make any difference to me, and it could never change the way I think about him. Though maybe he should consider trading up from Jonas Moakwright a little."

If he was expecting an answering smile from Charlie at that, he didn't get it. "Oh, I have. I do. I sleep with men and women both, you know. I'm pretty equal opportunity, and that's something else that makes you a freak, in anybody's world, but we won't go into that. I slept with Amita, for a few weeks. Larry too."

"Okay," Don said. "Well, that's. . ." He couldn't come up with what that was, because _Larry,_ seriously? And in the thirty-four years of his brother's life, or even the three years since he himself had been back in LA, this was the first time Charlie had thought to mention any of this? This was the way Charlie chose to come out? But if he showed his shock, it was game over, he knew that. "That's. . . you know, sometimes it's not such a great idea to sleep with people you work with, and maybe. . ."

"Yeah, well, anonymous sex is not as much fun as it sounds. And it's not like I—I mean, two, three weeks is generally all anyone can take. Most of them are done after two weeks of me. Amita didn't even make it that long. It's not the sex. I'm actually pretty amazing in bed, believe it or not."

"No, I. . . I don't have a—I'm sure." Don rubbed at his forehead, pushing it down.

"I slept with a member of your team, once."

"You did_ what?_" Don sat forward in his chair, no longer caring what his voice sounded like. "Charlie, what the hell—"

"It was David. It was way back, like after the first case I ever consulted on for you or maybe it was the second? But it was just a couple of times. Hey, I guess that means I've slept with two out of three lead agents in the LA office, huh? That's some kind of record."

"You've slept with Terry _too?_" Don was standing now, his hands gripping the edge of the table, and if that spoon in his coffee had been a fork, he would have stabbed Charlie in the eye with it. "Jesus Christ, Charlie!"

"I was counting you, actually," Charlie said, and the room rose slightly and spun, with Don at its center, all the muscles in his face locked and burning.

Charlie sipped his coffee and studied him, and Don's blinks were painful. After long minutes he wrenched his arms off the table and stalked through to the living room. He didn't grab his jacket from the coat tree because he didn't think his arms would work, exactly, but he drove to his apartment and got in the door and sat on the sofa, swallowing only when he had to, until it was time to go to work in the morning. At six, when he stumbled into the bathroom to shower, he looked in the mirror to check what he looked like, and was surprised to see the skin still on his face. He half expected the raw bloody bone to be sticking out of the pulpy mass that had once been his face, the face that had once belonged to Don Eppes, because he had been flayed with five simple words.

**II.**

"Hey Charlie, heads up," he said when he came in the door, and Charlie flinched and half-raised his arms in anticipation of the tossed baseball, and Don laughed, because he always fell for it.

"Hey, Don, how—how are you?"

"I'm good. Mom and Dad around?"

"In the—kitchen, yeah."

Don strode through the house, dropping his duffel of laundry on the way, kicking off his shoes in the dining room. He came back with a beer and sat on the couch, next to where Charlie sat Indian-style like he was ten. "So," he said, popping the top. "How was senior year at Princeton?"

"Oh, it was, you know."

Don laughed. "Actually, I have no freaking idea. Hey, just think, you've graduated college now, in a few more years you'll even be of legal drinking age. Listen." He took a sip off the top of his beer. "Sorry I couldn't make it to your graduation. I was gonna go, I really was, and I had my plane ticket and everything. Only I had this chance at the last minute to go to try-outs for this team, I mean they're only minor league but it's professional, and it looks like they might want me, so I had to head up to Stockton, and you know—"

"Don, that's—wow, that's great news, that's amazing!" Charlie grabbed his arm, his eyes shining with genuine enthusiasm, and Don smiled, sheepish.

"Thanks. I haven't told Mom and Dad yet, though. I mean, it might not even happen, and then they were all getting ready for going to Princeton for your graduation, so."

Charlie ducked his head and shrugged. "Well, it was—you should tell them. They'll be so excited."

Don gave a short laugh at that. "Yeah, I wouldn't bet on that. But like I said, sorry I couldn't make it."

"No." Charlie shook his head. "I'm sorry I couldn't make it to _your_ graduation. I know Mom and Dad were gonna go to both, they were planning on it, but I think they thought Princeton's would be later than it was, and when they had already bought the ticket, I know they felt—"

"Charlie." Don swallowed more beer. "Don't do that, okay? It's not your fault. Hey." He rubbed Charlie's shoulder. "So, did Mom loosen up the reins any this year? I mean, did she ever let you actually attend a party? I thought that maybe, senior year, you might have a low and outside chance of getting laid."

Charlie laughed. "Um, no. I was living in an off-campus apartment with my mom, it's like I was hosed down with an aerosol can of girl-repellent."

"Being seventeen probably didn't help."

"Hey, I'll be eighteen next month. And no, I don't think that was the problem. The jailbait aspect probably worked in my favor."

Don laughed into his beer, grinning wide. "So, you should tell them," Charlie continued. "Mom and Dad, about the Stockton team. Was it the Rangers?"

"Yeah," Don said, putting down the beer. "It was the Rangers."

"That's—that is so fantastic. How did you do at the try-outs? Did you—"

"I did okay. There were a couple of pitches I could have done better on. I'll wait to say anything to Mom and Dad until I hear."

"We should celebrate," Charlie said firmly.

Don gave him a skeptical glance. "Gonna take me to a bar?"

"Well, we could do something else."

"What, like a festive round of putt-putt?"

"Hey, did you know, baseball players are statistically very adept at golf. It's the same upper-body torsion, a similar flexion trajectory. Well, that, and in both sports it doesn't really matter if you're fat, I mean statistically speaking the body mass index of baseball players tends to be on the heavy side, and—"

"Okay, now I have to beat the crap out of you," Don said, setting his beer down first. He grabbed a fistful of Charlie's curls and twisted, and Charlie shrieked in half-real, half-pretended pain, and Don climbed on top of him and got in a couple of good knees to his middle before Mom came in and made them stop. She frowned at Don, shaking her head at him, and when her back was turned Charlie punched him in the ribs, hard, the little shit. He laughed at the ache of it, rubbing his side ruefully, and he was a little surprised—that had been a man's blow, with a man's quick force behind it, and he was going to have to stop thinking of Charlie as a scrawny little kid.

* * *

"So, about the—thing you asked me, I kind of—I mean, that wasn't. . . exactly true."

Don frowned up at the ceiling. "What wasn't exactly true?"

"About. . . you know. The girl thing, and the. . . the thing about. . . about gtngld."

Don took a minute to unravel that into _getting laid._ "Not exactly true, huh."

Don was lying on the big futon out in the garage apartment, Charlie spread out next to him. It had felt a little too much like being a kid, coming home and sleeping in his old room, and he was a man now. About to have a man's job, because he knew he had gotten the position with the Rangers, he knew it in his gut. So he had staked out the garage as his space—hung a few posters on the bare beams, opened up the futon, plugged in the mini-fridge. It was just temporary, until he moved to Stockton, but it was better than sleeping in a kid's room, lined with a kid's trophies and a kid's books and a kid's ancient plastic dinosaurs. He propped himself on his elbow. "So, what part wasn't exactly true?"

He could see Charlie's Adam's apple as he swallowed. "Well. I did in fact. . . you know."

"Um, no I don't. Did in fact what?"

Charlie sighed. "Yes you do. You know." He made a vague circular gesture with his hand. "That."

"'That' being sex."

"Well." Charlie kept staring at the ceiling. "I don't think sex is really the word. I mean it didn't. . . work."

"What do you mean, it didn't work?"

Charlie rolled over and rested his head on his arms, so he could stare at the mattress instead of the ceiling. He plucked at a bit of the blanket. "I don't. . . it was awful, all right? I was awful. I couldn't—I didn't—it's just, I'm never going to have sex again. I mean, even if I were willing, which I completely am not, she probably called everyone she knows on the east coast to tell them what an embarrassing loser Charlie Eppes is, and what a joke, and so I am clearly never, ever going to get laid again, though it's not really _again_ since I couldn't even manage it the first time."

"Hey. Hey, buddy, calm down. No one has great sex their first time, believe me. The first time I ever slept with a girl, know what she said to me?"

Charlie looked up hopefully. "What?"

"She said, are you done?"

Charlie didn't smile. "The girl I tried to sleep with, let's just put it this way, she never had to ask that question. It was pretty obvious I was done."

"Ah." Don considered. "Came too fast?"

"Well, that depends. Only if you consider 'before any clothes were removed' too fast."

Don bit back the laugh, but allowed himself the smile. "Charlie, that happens to everyone."

"Their first time?"

"Sure, especially their first time. I mean, you're cranked, you're ready to go, this is it – you body just gets a little, you know, overexcited."

Charlie mumbled something.

"What?"

"I said, I don't think that's it. I mean. . . I can't bring myself to even look at a girl now. She was. . . she was pretty mad. She said she should have known better than to sleep with a fucking middle-schooler, and then she told me to get out. Her apartment, it was on the other side of town, and I wasn't sure how to get back to my place because, well, you know me and directions, and I didn't have enough for the bus, and it was pretty much the worst night of my life. Ever."

Don contemplated asking for her name and finding her, bashing her door in. A brief angry rape fantasy flitted across his brain before he squashed it. "Charlie. That's not. . . look. You just have to get right back in the saddle, is all."

Charlie snorted.

"I'm serious, buddy. It's not—look, this is not brain surgery. Hell, it's not even algebra. If that's your particular problem, you just need to. . . practice a little."

Charlie's second snort was even more eloquent. "Practice."

"Well, sure. How do you think this works? Look." Don shifted so he was facing Charlie. "Everybody has had that issue at some point, trust me. What you do is, you just, you know, you work on it for a while when you jack off, and then, you know, you'll be fine."

"Work on it. Like. . . how?"

"Well. Like I said, it's not—" he avoided the word _hard._ At least that was not the problem. "Look, what you do is, you—you just draw it out a little, yeah? You just edge a little bit, and then you're good."

Charlie frowned. "Edge?"

"Yeah, edge, you never heard of it? It's when you—well look, when you jack off, how long does it normally take you? Like in the shower, or whatever?"

In the light from the desklamp, he could see Charlie's flush. "I don't—I'm not very—it doesn't. . ." He sighed, scrubbed at his head. "I'm not very good at it, okay?"

"Not good at it? Charlie, everybody's good at jacking off, trust me."

"Not me. I can't, you know. . . make it last." Charlie was clearly in an agony of embarrassment. "When I look at porn, the guys, when they're jacking off, they always make it seem so. . . I don't know how they do it, because I—I mean, it's like I can barely get a hand around myself, and then. . ."

"Okay," Don said thoughtfully. He avoided altogether the question of why Charlie was looking at porn of men jacking off. "Okay, this is a fixable situation. I'm gonna do what big brothers do here, okay? And you're gonna pay attention, and learn something. There's really only one way to learn this."

Carefully, Don unzipped his jeans and dug around until he had hauled his own dick out, soft and warm, balls half-in, half-out. Charlie's expression was simply curious.

"What are you—"

"Just watch."

Silently, he stroked himself to hardness. It didn't take long. "Now you," he said. "Come on, this is not some lecture on astrophysics. This is what you would call a hands-on learning experience."

"Like a lab," Charlie supplied, and Don grinned.

"Kinda, yeah."

He heard Charlie unzip, and he tried not to eye his brother's package, though it had been a few years since he'd seen his brother naked. He was struck by the injustice that his brother was not only a genius, but a genius with a slightly bigger dick.

"Yeah, okay, here we go." Don breathed deeply, closing his eyes, and tried to forget that he was doing this in front of someone else, and that his brother was on the bed right next to him. His body obliged, as it always did; he could feel himself hardening, lengthening, filling. He toyed with a couple of images. They lay like that for maybe a minute or so, both stroking in silence, Don listening to the rate of Charlie's breathing until he judged that it was time.

"Okay, stop," he said. The motion of Charlie's hand did not stop. "I said, _stop._" He grabbed Charlie's wrist. Charlie made a whimpering noise.

"Don, come on, don't—"

"No," he said firmly. "Now, I want you to take your hands and put your palms flat on the bed. That's right, just put 'em there. Don't move. Close your eyes and breathe deep, like really deep. Think of it like a train, and you're slowing the train down. That's right, just ease on the brake there."

Charlie was panting. His dick speared the semi-dark, purple and heavy. Don could catch the throb of vein, the pulse. He was seriously fucking close, just from a minute or so of this. "Okay, you okay? Just fix on something that's not sex. Think about math or something. Oh wait, that probably gets you hard too, huh."

"Shut up," Charlie said on a choked laugh.

"See, it worked though. Okay, here's what you do. Start stroking again, but slowly. And use both your hands. Take your left hand and grab your balls. No, not like that." He batted away Charlie's hands, which were clutching and rubbing and squeezing at his balls. Charlie was already groaning again. "Seriously, calm down. You're gonna use your hand to twist your balls a little bit, and that's gonna slow down the reaction time. Like this."

He demonstrated on himself, and let himself stroke a bit, too. Charlie was making these noises that made it a little hard to concentrate.

"Don, I can't," Charlie panted.

"Yes you can." Don reached for his hands again, both of them, and pushed them to the mattress. "Anyone can do this, trust me. Look at me, you don't think I'm hard, too?" Charlie did look at him, but it only made him groan more. He was writhing on the bed now.

"Have to come, Don, fuck, have to come."

"No you don't. Tell me something. Tell me. . . tell me something about math."

Charlie looked at him, wild-eyed. "I don't—what the hell do you mean, tell you something about math?"

"Something from a class you took, anything. Recite equations, whatever it takes."

"Conversion—between an autonomous system and a non-autonomous one—involves any _t_ substitution that—ah, Don, please—in—in vector form, _F_ can be separated in a linear fashion to create—ahh, I have to, can't—"

"Slowly," Don repeated. "Okay, start again. Slow. In, out, like breathing, see?" He released Charlie's hands and sat back on his heels. He was having a hard time controlling his own breathing. He went back to stroking, trying to keep it slow, but Charlie made these noises, and was pushing up with his hips like sex. He couldn't help it, that it got him hot. It would get anyone hot, the sounds Charlie was making. Charlie was writhing and twisting on the bed now, digging his heels in. Don tried to remember when sex had felt that good. Charlie made it look so good.

"Okay, back off again—not all the way, just a little bit. See what I'm doing here?" Charlie twisted to look as Don's hand slid slowly all the way up the shaft, squeezed the head, and then slid back down, with a twist at the end. He did that a couple more times. "Just like that, try it."

Charlie's body arched up toward him, his mouth open and groaning, his eyes glued on the motion of Don's hands. Don was no longer aware of his own quick motions, or of how he had turned on the bed toward Charlie. He couldn't look away. Charlie's grip was frantic, lightning-fast. "Can't stop can't stop can't—fuck!" and a hot squirt came out the end of Charlie's dick, then another, and another in rapid succession. It landed on Don's shirt, which he would have minded—would have minded the fuck out of—if he hadn't been so busy coming himself. Coming hard, over his hand and down his fist in heavier dribbles than Charlie's hungry eager squirts, but still, it stung the back of his eyes, it was so good.

"Sorry," Charlie gasped. "Sor—sorry."

"'S okay," Don slurred. "No, that was—you were doing all right there. You just need—more practice." He leaned over the side of the futon for the box of Kleenex, and tossed it to Charlie, who was blitzed and motionless. "It can be kind of a mess," he panted, tossing a handful Charlie's way. "When you hold off like that."

"Fuck," Charlie breathed, and he turned his head to Don, his eyes still wide. He hadn't blinked yet, that Don could tell. Reverential, was the only way to describe how Charlie was looking at him. "That was. . . unbelievable. That was the best, the best it's ever felt."

"Seriously?"

"Yeah." Charlie licked his lips.

"Well, it's just a technique. You know I didn't like, invent that or anything, right?"

"Close enough."

Don laughed out loud at that, and then Charlie did too, his face splitting at the edges with warmth and bliss, and all Don could think was, _I did that. _ It made his chest crack open and things spill out.

* * *

So that was how it had started.

It was never anything much weirder than that. Never anything weirder than what he had gotten up to with his fraternity brothers, in fact. He had spent plenty of weekends sitting around the frat house jacking off to some porn with other guys. Not like he was proud of it, and not like he had done it a lot, but sure, guys did that sort of thing.

"They do?" Charlie said, when he described it to him.

"Sure." Don shrugged. "Circle jerks, you know. Guys are always doing that kind of thing."

"Really." Charlie seemed deeply impressed by this new information.

"Guys jack off with other guys all the time." He hoped his voice sounded casual and convincing, but whether he was trying to convince Charlie or himself, he wasn't sure. They were lying on his futon after a jerk-off session, and there was a thin crackle in the dark from Charlie's joint.

"You _didn't_," Don had said when Charlie had come back late that afternoon and tossed the baggie on his chest as he sat on the sofa.

"I did," Charlie had smirked. "Turns out, it's not that hard."

"Ah, no, not in L.A., for Christ's sake. Watch out, Mom and Dad could walk in any minute."

"Bet they've done it. Bet they used to get high in the 60s all the time. Hey, wanna go dig through their stuff and see if we can find an old bong or something? I know where they keep all that kind of crap. Once, I even found their box of sex toys."

"Argh." Don had rolled over on the couch, hands firmly over his ears, gone fetal. "Stop, stop, stop! I am not yet a major league professional athlete with the money to pay for all the therapy that is going to require."

Charlie had laughed and snatched up the baggie. And now they were lying here, a couple of good jerk-offs later, awash in the haze of pot and satiety. Good thing Mom and Dad never came out there, because the fog of marijuana was probably settling around the building like a major-density cloudbank. "So here's a thought," Charlie said, after a long drag.

"What's a thought."

"Mom and Dad."

"What about 'em?"

"Well." Charlie made a motion in the dark with his hand. Don tracked the glowing tip of the joint. "So Mom goes with me to Princeton, right? For three years, she lives with me at Princeton, from August to May. That's ten months a year for three years, thirty months."

"My God, they're right, you _are_ a math genius," Don laughed, and Charlie elbowed him. The laughter swelled under both of them for a minute or so.

"So, seriously," Charlie said after a while. "I mean it. What the hell was up with that, do you think? I never remember it being a big deal that they lived apart for basically three years. Mom talked about leaving her practice all the time. She was always talking about maybe taking the bar in New Jersey and practicing there during the school year, instead of just the research work she ended up doing for her firm here. The thing is—" he took another long drag, held it, and Don watched the slow creep of smoke out his lips. "The thing is, I don't ever remember either one of them seeming to care about being apart from the other one."

"Well." Don considered. "You're married long enough, you get. . . relaxed about those kinds of things. I guess."

"Yeah. No, I don't think so."

Don turned toward him. "What, you think they have problems?"

Charlie gave him an odd look. "Well, yeah. You've never thought about it?"

"I guess. . . no, I guess I haven't."

"You should think more deeply about life, Donald."

Don caught him sharp in the ribs, which struck them both as so funny they couldn't stop laughing for a long time, and then couldn't remember what they were laughing about. They fell asleep out there that night, passed out and sprawled on the futon, and when Don went down to breakfast the next morning his mother made a cryptic remark about the dangers of smoking in bed, and Don nodded gravely and tried to avoid looking at Charlie's smirk.

The next night, Don was the one who showed up with the party favors. "Glenfiddich single malt," he announced, setting the brown bag on his desk. Charlie was lying on the futon, flipping through a magazine, and looked up in surprise.

"What's that for?"

"You do have your own room, you know. You hang out up here when I'm not even here, now?"

"I like it out here. What's that for?"

"Celebration," Don said, pulling it out of the bag.

"Cool! What are we celebrating?"

Don smiled. "You are looking at the newest Stockton Ranger."

Charlie whooped—that was the only word for it—and launched himself at Don, who fortunately was braced. "Don, that's incredible! Holy shit, congratulations! Oh my God, you're for real now, you're a professional, holy Christ, I can't believe it!" And then he hopped up onto the futon and began dancing on it, a festive jig that the creaky old futon protested.

"Okay, okay, calm down," Don said, but he was grinning. "Don't tear down the house."

"Holy shit, we have to go tell Mom and Dad right now, they're home, you have to go tell them!"

"No, it's—I did," he said. "I did." He kept his head down and fiddled with the brown wrapper. "They're, you know, they're glad."

A silence fell, as Charlie slowly stepped off the futon. Don heard the creak of the floorboards, and almost jumped at the chill of Charlie's fingers curling around the back of his neck. "Fuck them," Charlie said quietly. He shook Don by his neck, gently. "Fuck them. Come here." And for the first time in his life, Don was folded into the embrace of his kid brother. He stayed there for as long as he dared, wondering where Charlie had managed to learn soothing noises like that, had learned to stroke the nape of his neck like that.

They got drunk off their asses, that night.

They got so drunk, that at about one in the morning it seemed like a fabulous idea to climb out on the roof of the garage with Charlie's old telescope and see what they could find in the night sky. They were too drunk to find the sky, but they did find Mrs. Wentz from two houses over. "Holy shit," Charlie laughed. "I don't think that's Mr. Wentz."

Don rolled over and grabbed for the telescope. He missed, and went rolling a bit. Quite a bit, actually. "Uh oh," he said, as the gutter stopped his foot. Charlie was still laughing, up on the top of the roof. "Erf, a little, little help here?"

"Hang on, Mrs. Wentz is—oh shit, I had no idea she was this hot. Is that—I don't think that's _legal_, what she's doing."

"Charlie!" Don's cry for help would have sounded more urgent if he hadn't been laughing. He tried to whisper so as not to wake up Mom and Dad. He turned his head to try to find where Charlie was, because the roof was shifting a little, only all of a sudden there were sharp things poking him. He rolled over and saw they were azaleas. "Um, I think I fell," he remarked to no one in particular.

"Don?" He could hear Charlie's surprised voice, and he started laughing again, and he imagined Charlie looking around, puzzled. Sometime after that he got back inside, though he wasn't sure how. There were bits of azalea stuck in his hair, and Charlie was laughing, pulling them out. The sticks were prickly, and hurt a bit.

"Who drank my scotch?" he demanded. "Who fucking drank my scotch?" He was staring at the empty bottle on the desk.

"Whoops," Charlie said. "I think we did that."

"Fuck, that's really going to piss me off when I find out about it," Don replied, and this sent Charlie off into more laughter. They fell on the futon and waited for the room to stop spinning. He felt like an axis. He tried to wait out the room, but couldn't, so he napped while he was waiting. When he woke, the room was dark. Someone had turned off the light. Had he? Or Charlie had. He couldn't remember. He rolled over and tugged at the blanket, which was under Charlie. Charlie's eyes fluttered open.

"Hey," he whispered. He brushed an arm over Don's head. "So you're a Ranger."

"Yeah," Don said.

"Congratulations."

"Yeah," Don said.

"So now I can come to all your games."

"That's gonna be a little tough," Don said on his yawn, "if you're going back to Jersey. But hey, you'll probably have that Master's and PhD. knocked out in ten, eleven months at the outside. You'll catch my second season for sure."

"For sure," Charlie murmured. "Come here." And Don scooted closer and let Charlie fold him back in his arms. He couldn't get over it, a brother the same size as he was. Being held like this, it seemed like the sort of thing your mom would do. Other people's moms, maybe. "Your life would have been better," Charlie said into the dark, "if your parents had been a little better with the birth control."

For a minute it didn't hit him what Charlie had said. The drunk was wearing off, or worn off, but he didn't trust himself to move too quickly. He grabbed a fistful of Charlie's shirt. "If you ever fucking say that again. . ."

"It's true."

"It's never true."

For answer, Charlie's hand moved from stroking his head and hair to stroking his side. Then his hand was stroking Don's front. His hand was rubbing at the front of Don's jeans. There was a bulge there, and Don wasn't sure if the bulge had come before the stroking or not. Sometimes being drunk made him randomly hard.

"Charlie," Don breathed, meaning it to be the first part of _Charlie, stop, _ only Charlie maybe took it as encouragement, or maybe he wasn't as quick on the _stop_ as he had meant to be.

"Come on, let's do each other," Charlie whispered in the dark, and just like that, he was being unzipped, and there was a warm hand closing on his dick, which all of a sudden could think of no objections.

"Okay, hang on, let me—okay," Don panted, and his hands were getting Charlie's jeans unzipped too. The dark was full of only their hands working silently and fast. He tried not to keep edging his hips closer to Charlie's. Maybe if it was just their hands. He had never done this before, had another guy's hand on his dick. He tried to shut his eyes, imagine it was someone else's hand, a girl's maybe, Alicia's from that party the night before graduation. Only when he opened his eyes, Charlie and his thick curly-haired arm was a thousand times hotter. Charlie's hand was strong and sure, Charlie's dick fit in his hand like his own.

"Oh God," he whimpered, and his come spilled over Charlie's hand.

"Fuck, Don," Charlie groaned. Charlie grabbed his wrist and held it steady so he could fuck into it, and in three more thrusts he was coming, too.

Don at least had the good sense to pull the blanket up over them before they both fell asleep.

* * *

It was as though that was the tipping point that they had needed, that night.

It never progressed to fucking. And by unspoken consent, mouths were never involved—not on dicks, not on other mouths. But everything they could do with their hands, they did. And Don stopped thinking about it as a guy thing, like things guys might do at a frat house. He thought of it as a Charlie thing, a thing unique to him and Charlie, because Charlie wasn't like other people. And then after the night they rode each other until they came, he stopped thinking about it altogether.

That night, they didn't have either pot or alcohol, but didn't need them anymore anyway. It was Charlie who rolled over on top of him and pinned his shoulders down. They had been wrestling, tussling for the bottle because Charlie would not lay off his mini-fridge, dammit, and Don had come in and found Charlie stretched out on _his_ futon like he owned the place, reading _his_ magazines, about to pop open the top on _his_ last strawberry yoo-hoo, and he had tackled him. The yoo-hoo had gone rolling, but it was the moral victory Don was after. Only, Charlie ended up being the one who pinned him, through sheer luck, and then Charlie had his shoulders down and was pushing into him.

He didn't say _Charlie, no, _ that time. He didn't say anything at all. He didn't look away. He watched Charlie and Charlie watched him, and they pushed into each other until the pace became quick and frantic. Then Charlie reached down and unzipped them both, so they were skin to skin in their groin. Charlie's fingers were digging into his hips. Don eased him up just a bit, so their dicks could rub full length, up and down—more friction than pressure.

"I'm going to come on you," Charlie said in a strangled voice, only at that, the come that spurted out wasn't Charlie's but Don's. Charlie shot right after him, and stayed like that for a while, on top of him, canted back on his heels, watching the cooling puddle on top of Don's shirt.

And after that, nothing stopped them. Charlie slept out there in the garage almost every night, now, and their parents didn't think anything of it—thought it was great, in fact. His mother even said as much—how great it was to see them so close now. Fortunately Charlie was wearing shades when she said it.

Sometimes Don was out of the house all day, hanging out with old high school friends, people he hadn't seen in a while. He had his own battered Toyota to drive around in, and his parents never questioned his comings and goings—never really had, truth be told. It wasn't like he was Charlie, or something. So some nights he didn't get back to the house until after midnight, and he would lie in the futon and let his beer buzz float him around, and then he would hear the creak of the stair and know it was Charlie, and he'd be hard before Charlie hit the top step. It was pitch black up where he had the futon, no windows on this corner, and Charlie would slide in.

They wouldn't have to say anything. They never said anything. Charlie would scoot in, and turn toward him, and they would push their hips together, and in a brief fierce wrestling match that Don did not always win, they would decide who was on top. They rode and fucked and humped until they came, then collapsed. It was the worst, clumsiest sex he had ever had, and it made him hotter than anything ever had.

When Charlie started falling asleep out there, he didn't wake him. He did make sure they at least had underwear tugged up, and that there were blankets and things. Charlie fell asleep like a log after coming, and sometimes Don would lie there in the dark and watch him. Once, he touched him when he was sleeping, just to see what would happen. He put a hand on the side of Charlie's face, and Charlie didn't move, other than a slight hitch and deepening in his breath.

Once, when they had fallen asleep like that, he woke up hard the next morning. Achingly hard, the sort of hard where if he had been alone, he would have gripped himself and gotten off, fast and morning-rough. He wondered if they could fool around in the morning, too. They had never done that. Screwing around was for night time, for the dark, when no one else in the whole world was awake and thus things could be whatever they wanted to be. Only he was really, really hard. He pushed his dick against Charlie's backside, gently, then a little more forcefully. Charlie shifted, and Don froze, afraid he'd gone too far. The futon creaked, only Charlie didn't turn around—he just re-adjusted. He was—fuck, Charlie was sliding his boxers down, giving Don access to warm skin. He reached around for Don, and moved himself so his crack was closer to Don's dick. Don took the invitation, and slid along the crack. He came like that, pushing against Charlie's warm backside while Charlie worked his own dick, and if there was a deeper, darker thing they wanted that morning, neither of them ever named it. They had stopped naming things weeks ago.

* * *

The week before Charlie left to go back to Princeton, and Don left for Stockton, Don took him to a party at Cindy's house. He had known Cindy a little at USC, but he had liked her—well, mainly he had wanted to sleep with her, but same thing. So when she had called the house and said she was in town, and moving into a condo in Burbank, and did he want to come out to a party at her place, that had been a no-brainer.

"There'll be a lot of people," she said, just in case he got the wrong idea. So he took Charlie along, because that was what Charlie needed, a genuine party with other people and alcohol and no geniuses in a 100-meter radius.

"I really, sincerely do not want to go to this," Charlie said, deploying his most winning earnest puppy eyes, and Don had shoved at his head.

"Get out of the car. Look, you are now officially eighteen years old, you are going to be a graduate student in another week, for Christ's sake, and this is, you know, the final frontier. An actual party. You can do this."

"All right," Charlie sighed, unbuckling his seat belt. "But this is going to be a miserable night, I'm warning you."

Charlie was right, of course, because Charlie was never wrong. Charlie was showered with attention he minute he walked in the door – feminine squeals and head-pats and "oh my God, Princeton!" and "how old are you now, oh my God you are adorable!" and all the beer that could be pressed into Charlie's confused hands and all the squirming blondes that could possibly fit on his eager lap, and yep, Charlie was right, it was the most miserable night ever, in the history of all possible evers. Only not for Charlie.

"Don," Cindy breathed, her arms looped about his neck. "You never said your brother was this precious. Oh my God, I just want to eat him up." She had him backed into a corner in the crowded kitchen, and people he didn't know kept bumping into them both, because they were directly in the path of the keg. "Where on earth have you been hiding him all this time?"

"He has several sexually transmitted diseases. Also genital warts," he added for good measure, but she wasn't listening—someone else had grabbed her waist from behind and she was husking a sexy-drunk laugh. He waited another forty-five minutes or so and then tried to find Charlie. He figured it was a safe enough bet to look inside every cluster of girls, because Charlie was sure to be buried underneath one of them, but nope, no Charlie. He checked everywhere he could think of, except the one place he didn't want to, which was upstairs. So when he had no other alternative, he fought his way up the stairs, and past the people draped in the stairwell in faux-earnest conversations, and opened a couple of bedroom doors until he found the one Charlie was in.

He was fucking away, and he had made a nice choice—a voluptuous little redhead with long shiny French-manicured nails that were scratching along Charlie's back.

"Fuck, baby, yes," she moaned, and Don was frozen there in the doorway, watching the controlled motion of Charlie's hips, the slight roll on the upthrust. His body certainly seemed to have decided it knew what it was doing; no rhythm problems in evidence here.

"Oh—yeah," Charlie breathed, in the voice Don knew. He shut the door quietly, and went downstairs, and made his way through the crowd and onto the back deck, as best he could. He managed to make it around the side of the condo, into the dark where the scraggly bushes leaned against the side of the house and the hose was curled up, and he gripped the wall and heaved the contents of his stomach out onto the dirt. He threw up until he didn't have anything left, and then he slid against the side of the house and pressed his face on the cool stucco.

* * *

The next week, he left for Stockton, and Charlie left for Princeton—no Mom with him this time. Don drove him to the airport, and he was quiet the whole way. Charlie was, too.

"You don't have to park," Charlie protested as they pulled up. "You can just drop me off at the curb."

"Charlie, come on, I am not dropping you off at the curb. I'll park, and go inside with you. How else am I going to explain to the stewardess that you're traveling alone?"

Charlie shoved at him, and Don grinned, though it hurt his face. When he parked the car in short-term, Charlie made a grab for his wrist. "Don," he said. "I want to—" They sat there for a second. "I had a great summer," Charlie said. "The best summer of my life."

"Yeah," Don said. "It was—it was great."

"It was. . . it was really something."

Don could think of nothing to say to that, so he sat there. He wished Charlie would let go of his wrist.

"There was only one thing that I didn't get to do, though."

"Oh yeah?" Don cocked a brow. "Well, I'm having a hard time imagining what that could be."

"It was this." And Charlie pulled on his wrist so he had to lean over, and Charlie bent his face to Don's, and the lips had started to brush his before Don even knew what he was trying to do.

"Charlie, no, come on," he said, recoiling so fast his head almost hit his window. He shifted and used the hand that Charlie had been holding to rub at his face. He turned away and watched the parking attendant at the toll booth, Jesus, the car didn't even have tinted windows. Anyone could see.

"We need to, we have to get you inside," he said, and Charlie said, "Okay, Don," and got out of his side of the car. They unloaded his two bags, and Don walked him inside and then all the way to the gate, and they sat there and waited for his plane and ate pretzels with garlic and onion chips, all in utter, utter silence. When they called Charlie's seat number, Don made a grab for him, a clumsy desperate hug, only he didn't let go for a second, and he hoped the shaking of his body could say everything he himself did not have the balls to say: _I'm sorry_ and _I'll miss you_ and _please don't go_ and _I don't know what to think_ and _I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry so sorry. _

Charlie's motion against him might have been a nod, or he might have just been trying to twist free. Charlie rubbed him on the shoulder and walked down the gangway, and Don waited until the plane took off. He tracked its trajectory like it was a slow ball leaving the plate, only this time the ball was traveling away from him, away, away, away.

He had never learned to lay off the pitches that were no good for him.

**III.**

For the week after Charlie had said those five words, he went cold-turkey no-Charlie.

He had no right, for one thing, and for another, he couldn't think of what to say. There was no opening line that did not begin with _I am so fucking sorry, _ and that was just too pallid a thing to say to Charlie, ever.

The thing was, he had thought it was the same for Charlie as it was for him: that summer was a stupid adolescent thing that probably, at some point, most siblings did, and then they got over it and went on with their lives and had the good grace, the good sense—the decency, even—never to mention it to each other again. Which was right about the point his own anger started to rub up against Charlie's anger a bit, because Charlie had broken The Rule, and if there was one defining principle of their adult relationship, it was that you never broke The Rule by actually Mentioning It.

The thing was, that was a lie.

He had broken his brother's life, and he knew it. Any pretending that they were just goofy teenagers fooling around was just that, pretending, because one of those people had been twenty-two years old and an adult, and only one had been a goofy, socially challenged, enormously confused, infinitely vulnerable teenager. In the eyes of the law—in his own eyes, when he saw clear, and most days he did—there was only one word for what he had done.

So, his opening line really ought to go like this: _I am so fucking sorry that I molested you and sent your life into a sexual tailspin from which you have clearly never recovered._

He walked through the rest of his week amused, when he thought about it, by the irony of the cuffs clipped to his belt. By rights he ought to be the one wearing the cuffs, not carrying them. Terry ought to pin him to the desk with one arm twisted behind his back and read him his rights. Felony rape. He knew the sentencing guidelines by heart. He had sat in front of the microfiche at Quantico and tortured himself by memorizing them, late one night in the library. And every time after that he had thought about Charlie, thought about calling him, writing him, or worse, thought about letting his imagination stray the slightest from the tunnel he hammered it into when he was jacking off—every time he was tempted in the slightest, he recited those guidelines.

And then below it all was the deeper sting of shame and humiliation. Humiliation in front of Charlie, which was the one unbearable humiliation in life. He writhed inside when he thought of it, twisted in shame. It turned out, Charlie knew the name for what he had done, when Don had thought that maybe, if there was a merciful God, it was just his secret. Maybe Charlie had even forgotten. Maybe Charlie had believed what he himself desperately wanted to believe—that it was all normal, that everybody did it. But Charlie didn't believe that. Charlie knew the truth, had maybe had it figured out years ago, and was angry. So angry. As he had every fucking right to be.

And Don, he had no rights.

So for one week, he went cold-turkey, and had enough respect for Charlie not to call him, not to drop by the house, not to e-mail him, not to go to CalSci. His hand itched for his phone. For his keyboard. For his car keys. But he would not. And because he would not, Charlie did.

The following Friday night, Charlie knocked on his apartment door. Don didn't have to answer it to know it was Charlie, but since it was Charlie, he didn't have to answer it at all, because Charlie came on through the door, shoved it open practically, and dropped the heavy box onto the coffee table. He was panting from it, and he looked like he hadn't shaved in a week.

"So, hi," he said. Don looked up from the bowl of cereal on his lap, and Charlie frowned at the cereal. "So what, you thought you would just ditch Friday night?"

"I—"

"No, you know what, don't talk. Don't say anything. I started this because I couldn't stop running my mouth, because I couldn't stop talking, and I'm going to fix it."

_By talking? _ Don wanted to say, but he didn't. He put the spoon back in the bowl and used the paper towel to wipe at the milk on his mouth. "Charlie," he sighed, but Charlie didn't let him finish.

"No, seriously, I mean it, shut up. Put the goddamn cereal down and look at me. Okay, see, this is the part where you listen. I know what you're thinking. I know everything you're thinking. I always know everything you're thinking, except when I don't, but this is one of the times I do. You've been ignoring my texts for a week because you've been working yourself into a grand mal _I'm sorry_, haven't you? See, I know this. But for once in my life, I'm going to get there first. You ready for this? I'm sorry."

Don rubbed at his forehead. Now Charlie was apologizing for bringing the whole thing up in the first place, which just made him more miserable. Charlie—Charlie!—was going to come up here, to his apartment, and pretend he actually had anything to apologize for. To him. It made him want to spit up on the carpet. "Charlie," he began again.

"Shut up," Charlie said even more firmly. "Just shut up. Wait for it. I'm sorry, Don, because for the better part of two decades now I have let you do this to yourself, and I've been too much of a coward to say anything. Well, I'm done. So I'm going to say it now: what happened when I was seventeen was not your fault. Are you listening to me? It was not your fault."

Don studied his hands. "Charlie. You were. . . you were a kid. I knew better. I'm sor—"

"No." Charlie's voice was louder even than Arnelle's music from downstairs. "What the fuck, Don. You honestly think–you honestly think I was that innocent? Seriously?" He gave what might have been a laugh. "All this time, and that's what you thought. You thought it because I let you think it. You say I'm not a freak, right? Well, I never got to finish the other night, so let me tell you just how much of a freak I really am. Let's talk about it, okay, let's really and for once in our lives talk about it, what do you say? I had it all planned, Don. For months, I'd had it planned. For years, maybe. Exactly what I would say, what I would do. I had these elaborate scenarios all mapped out, and no, I can't exactly say I knew what I wanted to happen after that, but it sure as hell wasn't this. It sure as hell was not decades of torture for both of us, so for that, I'm the one who's sorry. Not you. Me. Poor Charlie, the innocent little virgin. Oh, Donny," he mimicked himself, "show me how to have sex, I just don't _know_. I just don't think I _can_. Jesus Christ, Don, I'd been fucking my brains out since I was fourteen."

The cereal was cold on his lap.

"Oh," he said.

"I seduced you," Charlie said.

He held his hands up, near his ears, like he wanted to stop the words. "Shut up. Shut up, stop it, just—"

"I seduced you, and then got all pissy because what do you know, you didn't love me back, and turns out my ridiculous juvenile fantasy was exactly that, a fantasy. Don, listen to me. Please understand that I really am a freak. Things are broken inside me, all right? Maybe it's the same part of my brain that makes the numbers. You couldn't honestly think, Mom and Dad couldn't possibly think, that the only thing wrong with my brain was the numbers, could you? I am not a normal human being, and sometimes the things that are wrong in me end up working out well for me, like the numbers, and sometimes the things that are wrong are just wrong, like the fact I've been in love with my male sibling since I was oh, about five. It's just broken, and it can't be fixed. But don't kid yourself about me any more. Don't ever think, don't you ever fucking dare to think, when you look at me, that you're looking at anything but a freak."

_Charlie_, he tried to choke out, but there was nothing in his throat. Charlie was looking at him, and whatever Charlie expected, Don couldn't do it.

"Okay," Charlie said. "That was all I wanted to say. I lied and told Dad you were tied up with a case at work and had called me to let me know, and I had forgotten to tell him. So that's okay, at least."

And he turned and walked out, not even slamming the door behind him. Don sat there and watched his cereal disintegrate, untroubled, because he was certain he would never eat again. After a time he got up and clicked off the TV and stood looking down at Charlie's box. He wasn't sure what he expected—part of him thought it was going to be all the things he had left at the house, and maybe in a fit of rage Charlie had thrown it all in a box and taken it to him, here, so he would know never to come back over there. Only of course, that wasn't it at all.

Don opened the box and stared inside it. He pulled out the first thing on top, the yellow legal pad, and stared at the scribbling on it. He flipped through the pad, page after page of it, all covered with the same dense incomprehensible thicket of numbers.

He looked down into the box at the rest of the legal pads. It was a huge stack of them, and they were all the same, all covered in exactly the same Charlie-scribbles. He pulled them all out and flipped through all of them, frowning in—puzzlement? Disbelief? Angles of entry, trajectories, percentages—it couldn't be what he thought it was. He came to the pad marked in careful pencil "Home Games 1987," and then he knew for certain what he was looking at, what he had always been looking at, and it knocked him to his knees.

* * *

"Right," Charlie said, flipping the chalk a little. "And recursively, that would be written how? Which one of these would be the more accurate way?"

"The one on the left," said the girl with the long ponytail. They looked young, younger than graduate students. Don didn't know Charlie ever taught any undergrads.

"Yes." Charlie flashed a grin at her. "And this notation here." He tapped the chalkboard behind him, and a couple of them twisted around to see. It was just a handful of them, enough to pull their chairs in a circle around the board. "Who introduced this notation?"

"Oh, wait." A scruffy-haired guy bounced his knee up and down nervously. "I know this. Hang on. What's his name. Andreas, ah, dammit—"

"Von Ettingshausen," ponytail pre-empted him. She became aware of Don, standing in the doorway, at the same time, and glanced his way. Charlie knew he was there, of course, because Charlie had never had to turn around to know he was there.

"Von Ettingshausen, that's right. You might have encountered some of Ettingshausen's work on combinatorial analysis in Dr. Deshanjay's class last semester. Anyone remember reading any of that?" They squinted at him a bit, with nervous smiles, and Charlie grinned again. "Uh huh, thought so. Tell you what. For Thursday, write me up an abstract of Andreas von Ettingshausen on combinatorial analysis. No illustrations necessary. In fact, please no illustrations," he said, and the class laughed again. It was obviously some sort of inside joke, but what was more obvious was how they all adored Charlie. It was in the way they tracked the chalk in his hand, reflected his smiles, tilted their heads when he looked their way.

"Another interesting thing about Von Ettingshausen, is that not only did he hold the University of Vienna's dual chair in mathematics and physics—see, you can go remind Dr. Fleinhardt that some physicists _can_ do their own calculations—" (this was greeted by more quiet laughter) "but he also designed a way to harness electrical induction for power generation. Look it up, his designs are really incredibly elegant. I think you'll enjoy them. Okay, so, if you've got any questions as you work through this week's calculations, be sure to e-mail me, all right? Or stop by whenever—"

They had started to gather their things, and a couple of them were heading closer to Charlie to ask more questions, or maybe just to soak up a little glow. "Dr. Eppes, if you could take a look for just a sec," ponytail was saying, trying to put a sheet of calculations in front of him, and Charlie was nodding thoughtfully, though it must have been like Rembrandt studying a four-year-old's sketch. Don leaned against the doorframe and waited until they had all filed out past him, and then he stepped all the way into the spacious high-windowed room.

"Dr. Eppes," he said. "I have some calculations for you to look at too."

"Oh yeah?" Charlie's smile was easy—a little too easy, as though he was trying to be as natural as possible.

"Yeah." Don slapped the yellow legal pad on the table and flipped to the page he had marked. "It's. . . here it is. This one."

Charlie was no longer smiling. He was looking down at the pad, at his ancient notations and scribbling. He shoved his hands in his pockets. "Okay," he said.

"So, I think I know what I'm looking at here, but I had a theory that I wanted to run by the expert."

"All right."

Don hesitated. "Your students really seem to like class. I forget what a good teacher you are, Charlie."

Charlie shifted, looked away. "They're good kids. And today was easy stuff, it's just, you know. . ." he waved his hand at the board.

"Binomial coefficients, yeah, I know." Charlie looked at him in surprise he was so obviously trying to mask, and Don snorted. "What, you don't think I know math at all? Let's just say the last year or so has been kind of a crash course in math review for me."

Charlie smiled. "Okay. So what did you want to show me?"

"This here." Don tapped the page. Charlie looked down at it and frowned.

"Right. That's. . . that was the Lakeview game, March of 86, right? Yeah, I remember there was an injury in the third inning—that second baseman who was obviously faking, and you tried to get the ump to call him on it, and then you got called for arguing. They had very salty peanuts at Lakeview, I do remember that."

"Uh huh. Well, I was thinking about this particular pitch, right here." Don tapped the page again. "See?"

"Mm, yeah, okay, that was first inning, you were fourth at bat. See, this little symbol here, that means the bases were loaded. This one here was the second pitch—you struck on the first. This one, that was one of those pitches, the ones you can never lay off, low and outside. Somewhere in here I ran a page of calculations of everything those pitches cost you—"

"Got it right here." Don reached into his pocket and pulled out the folded sheet that he had ripped off one of the other pads. He unfolded it carefully, smoothed it out. They were columns of numbers, with "L &amp; O" written on the top.

"Yeah," Charlie said, a bit wonderingly. "Yeah, see, if you had ever managed to lay off those, you can see right here what your average would have looked like. That's a five-percentage point jump."

"That's right," Don said. He flipped back to the Lakeview game. "But look here." He tapped the pad again. "This one was low and outside. And what happened here?"

"Well." Charlie frowned. "That was a three-base hit, but that doesn't have any affect on the overall data. That was a statistical anomaly."

Don shook his head. "I'm not so sure it is. Look at this, I ran some numbers of my own."

"Oh you did."

"Shut the hell up, I can do basic mathematics. I can run some numbers if I feel like it. Now look here, what you never considered is this. When I did connect with the low and outside pitches, what happened?"

"Well, that's not relevant to the—"

"But it is." Don flipped the page of stats over, to his own handwriting. He had worked on it all weekend, and it had better be right. "Look. When I did manage to connect with a low and outside pitch, what happens? Literally eighty-seven percent of the time, it's a three-base hit. Or better," he said with emphasis, jabbing at the paper. "Or better."

Charlie was looking at him oddly. "Yeah, and ninety-four percent of the time, you didn't connect at all with the low and outside pitches. And in four innings of that season, you completely struck out because you couldn't lay off them."

"Okay. Okay, I see that. Remember when I took you to the firing range, and you said you needed to feel the mechanics of firing a high-powered rifle?"

"Sure."

"Well, this is like that. Do you have any idea what kind of a sweet spot the low and outside pitch hits on the bat?"

Charlie frowned at him again. "Well, I'd have to have more data in order to account for the feel of the pitch connection, and I don't—"

"Listen to me," Don said, and grabbed his wrist. "You know why I kept hitting at them? Because when they worked out—man, when it actually worked—it felt like nothing else. Like nothing else."

Charlie was still just looking at him, and Don realized he was not explaining himself at all, so he went right for Plan B, because the stats had probably been a stupid idea. He put the pad down and moved in, and he grabbed two fistfuls of Charlie's soft corduroy jacket and planted his lips—dear God, please don't let him shake—planted his lips right on Charlie's, full and wide and open and unmistakable.

There wasn't even a millisecond of stiffness or surprise in Charlie's mouth. Charlie's lips pulled his in. There were no analogies rocketing around his head, nothing to compare it to. It was a slug of gin after a lifetime of water, a hot kick in the gut and the groin and the mouth. Don was being consumed by something lush and powerful, and his tongue was literally being pulled into Charlie's mouth. Then it stopped. Charlie's breath was hot on the side of his face, and he could feel Charlie's day-old stubble.

"This is not what you want," Charlie said.

"And how the hell would you know that."

"I think," Charlie said, extricating himself carefully, "that guilt is an extraordinarily powerful force. Especially your guilt. You are—you are whole generations, whole millennia of Jewish guilt in size nines and a shoulder holster, is what you are. You don't owe me anything, least of all this."

"Charlie," he tried, when what he really wanted to say was, _Charlie, I have a fucking hard-on now, can we analyze later, please? _ But the hard-on had not escaped Charlie, if the quick glance aimed at his front was any indication.

"Go home," Charlie said. "Please go home. I appreciate that you tried to do this, really I do. I'm sure I will be re-living it, oh, some seven or eight million times, but for now, what I really need, what I need more than anything, is for you to please, just turn around, and walk out that door and just—just go home."

It was his pleading that broke Don, because he would never refuse Charlie anything. He had known Charlie would take some convincing; it wasn't like he had expected Charlie to throw down with him on the floor of his classroom and start grinding. Although maybe certain parts of his body had, in fact, expected that.

"Okay," Don said, as casually and coolly as possible, because he was still dizzy with the shock of what it had felt like, kissing Charlie. He was light-headed with it. Like all your life, you drink white wine spritzers, and then one day, at some party, somebody hands you some heroin. Only, it wasn't quite like that, because this heroin, his body remembered, God, but it remembered. It remembered with a low insistent pulse that wasn't going to go away. It was okay, he had tinted windows, he could jerk off when he got to his car. "Okay," he said again, and pulled his shades out and put them on. He smoothed his shirt.

"Okay," he said for the third time. "I'll just, ah, leave those calculations with you then, Dr. Eppes." And he strode to the door, careful to leave it open partway, careful to walk briskly and purposefully down the hall and past the knots of students. A couple of them gave him wary sidestepping glances; it wasn't like he didn't know he stood out.

"Hi Don," Larry said from somewhere behind him, and Don turned to find Larry walking next to him, a preoccupied frown on his face as usual. "So how many federal codes of secrecy am I breaching when I ask if you were consulting Charles on a case? Or am I liable to extraordinary rendition if I bring it up?"

"Larry, you're aware of the difference between the FBI and the CIA, right?"

"I am, but I wouldn't vouch for Angela in the library. See you, Don." Larry veered off into another hallway with his odd, shuffling gait. "I'll—all right, sure, okay," he called, to no one in particular, and Don rolled his eyes, but politely, behind his shades.

* * *

And on the following Friday, he swung at it.

He had left Charlie alone all week, because that was what Charlie had wanted. He waited until that Friday night to climb the stairs to the garage apartment slowly, letting his foot hit all the creaks. There would be no surprises. He gripped the stair rail for a minute, as his eyes hit the pitch black, not so much to anchor himself as to stop himself from shaking. You could know something was right, and still be afraid of it.

When he stepped out into the room, there were no lights on. He'd made plenty of noise. Charlie always heard his car when he pulled up, anyway. And then he hadn't been quiet with the door, had made noise on the stairs. Enough to wake him. Enough so that Charlie could hastily click on the light, if that was what he wanted. But there was no tousled head above the covers, squinting at him, _hey Don what's up. _

Slowly, Don crossed the wide room over to the bed, letting the floorboards creak. Charlie had the bed—a generous king-size, no adolescent futon here—placed differently from how Don had had it, when he'd been living up here. He'd put the bed on the far side of the room, and there were comfortable chairs drawn up next to the old chalkboards. This was Charlie's space now, and yet somehow, they'd never left this room.

Charlie was lying there, in the dark, on the bed. For a second Don thought that maybe it hadn't worked, and that Charlie was still asleep, but no, Charlie's eyes were dark and quiet and open. He folded his hands behind his head, waiting, and Don pulled up the edge of the blanket and carefully slid in. The thing to do, on the low and outside pitch, was to hold nothing back, so Don slid in closer to Charlie—unmistakable now.

"Don," Charlie said, softly. It was his name like he said it every day.

"Yeah."

"You're wearing. . . all your clothes."

Don made a one-shouldered shrugging motion, not sure what to say. He would have felt like an idiot, standing there getting undressed while Charlie watched. Maybe he should have.

"Yeah, I don't really like shoes in the bed," Charlie said.

"Well, this is going great already," Don sighed, swinging his legs over to toe off his shoes, and then he pulled off his socks, what the hell. He turned back to Charlie, who was still looking at him. "Satisfied?"

"Not yet," Charlie said in a low voice. "But why don't you get over here and take care of that. I think I've waited long enough."

It took him a second to realize he had just been sexually challenged by his brother. He pulled off his shirt and threw it over. He heard Charlie breathe in, then out, and he knew it was because of him. Encouraged, he slipped off his jeans, then his shorts. He rolled back over in the bed, a little chilled now, and gasped when the blanket was ripped off him. Charlie, naked as he was, was sitting back on his heels looking at him.

"What the fuck are you doing, it's cold," Don said.

"I'm looking," Charlie said. "God, Don, you're beautiful." And he reached up a hand, laid it on his chest. The hand absently brushed a nipple and traveled down. It rested on his groin, and Don felt the pulse rise beneath Charlie's hand. Charlie was more naked than he had ever seen anyone be, mainly because he had never seen anyone as unconcernedly naked as Charlie.

"Charlie." He swallowed. "Please."

Charlie had never refused him anything.

* * *

And his life remained what it was: his life.

He got up in the morning, he went to work, he did his job, he came home. Home was the same it always was—one-fourth his apartment, three-fourths the house. Work was the same it always was—intense, frustrating, consuming. The paper looked the same in the morning when he unfolded it, his coffee tasted the same, his car started in the same way. David, Terry, his other agents, they all listened to him in the same way. His clothes felt the same on his body, his gun the same comforting weight against his side. Nothing had changed, and everything had.

You could live in a room your whole life, and know every inch of it. And then someone could—not turn on the lights, exactly, but maybe change the bulb. And suddenly things that had been dim shadows and outlines, before, would stand out in sharp relief. Colors, mainly. You would see colors, as you hadn't seen them, or had maybe only guessed them. Blue, for instance, looked black in dim light. Only with the light on could you see it for what it was, and what it always had been. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle said you could change things by looking at them, but Don now knew that there was a corollary: things didn't change by not looking at them. Refusing to see things didn't make them go away.

"Close your eyes," Charlie said once, when they were fucking. "Just feel. Don't think. It doesn't even have to be me. It's just pleasure."

He knew what Charlie meant, but he had a hard time closing his eyes, when they were together. He wanted every blink, every gasp, every swallow of Charlie's throat against his lips. He wanted it etched in his mind, wanted to see it. Which was, of course, a little difficult when he was pressed into the mattress getting his brains fucked out, as he was today.

"Come on, just do it," he ground out, because if he had a sexual complaint, it was that Charlie had a tendency to take things slow. Sometimes he knew it was a tease—fucking or getting fucked, Charlie wanted to see Don come undone for him. Maybe all those years ago, he should have taught Charlie that it was okay to take it fast sometimes, too.

"Impatient," Charlie said into his neck, and bit it, hard enough to make Don's cock twitch. He twisted Don's arm harder behind his back.

"Get a hand on me," Don gasped.

"I've got one on you," Charlie said, twisting the arm a bit harder.

"Ahh. That—ahh. On my cock, dumbass, come on, get me off."

He could feel the shake of Charlie's laugh above him. "And people say I'm the one with no social skills. I know for a fact you jacked off like, less than two hours ago. You can afford to take it slow."

"Well, that was because—ahh," he panted as Charlie gave the arm another twist. "That was because your message said you would be held up."

"But I wasn't." Charlie's dick resumed fucking him now, in and out, and Don spread his legs for it a bit more. "I wasn't," Charlie repeated, his voice tightening a little, because the pleasure was getting to him, too. "Tell me what you thought about, when you jacked off."

"What the fuck do you think I thought about."

"Me fucking you? Is that why you wanted this?"

"Y-yes."

"Can you feel it, inside?"

"Yes—fuck, yes Charlie I can feel it, just—don't stop again."

"Can't stop now," Charlie breathed, turning his face against Don's neck, and he didn't. Don had to get his own hand on himself, and soaked the mattress beneath him when Charlie gave a hard thrust to his gland that sent him spinning, groaning into his own climax.

"Fuck, Don, hold still, I have to—ah, fuck." Charlie was moving fast enough now, and in the depths of his relaxed body, Don felt the stutter and pulse of Charlie's orgasm. _Careful, for fuck's sake_, he almost muttered, because Charlie was not always over-careful about hitting the prostate when Don had come but he hadn't yet. They were hungry, both of them, always greedy for each other, and it wasn't always possible to be careful when you wanted that bad.

Sometimes, the hunger got so sharp he would have to excuse himself to the washroom in the middle of the day. It had happened just last week, when Charlie was in the bureau for what felt like, and probably was, fifty hours straight. They were all desperate equations and reconfigurations and shouted instructions and even more desperate phone calls, and during a lull, as they sat there in the office, Don had gotten hard. Gotten hard just looking at Charlie. Some of it had been the adrenaline of the case, sure. Some of it had been the smallest shade of a mark on the base of Charlie's neck that was only just visible when he turned, and that Don had put there the previous night. Some of it was Charlie's glance at him, the one that said _you know I'm there with you but please I have to figure this out now. _

So he had gotten up and ambled into the washroom and locked the door, and jerked himself quickly and painfully to an orgasm that buckled his knees, and then he had washed out the sink and splashed some water on his face. He walked back out and sat down, and Charlie's gaze missed nothing. After a few minutes Charlie had slammed down his pencil and stalked off to the washroom too. Don avoided looking at him when he came back.

And that night they had been so wild with each other that Don had had to make up a story about falling while getting out of the shower, to get around any questions about the bruise on the underside of his jaw. Their kisses that night had been so rough and frantic that he had half-expected that to be recorded on his face, too—maybe five perfect finger marks where Charlie had held his face, and Charlie would have clumps of his hair torn out and bloody from where Don had gripped him to hold him steady.

He started going back to the batting cages, for fun, on the weekends. They golfed with Dad, when it was warm enough, but Charlie hated golf, and as for recreation, well, you couldn't fuck all the time. It had been long enough that the feel of a bat in his hands barely hurt at all anymore.

"Wear a helmet," he snapped at Charlie, who liked to sit inside the cage with him and watch, while drinking a Coke. "You sit in the cage, you have to wear a helmet. Basic safety."

"Don't like 'em," Charlie said. He took a noisy slurp off his drink.

"What, they—" he swung and tipped it, godfuckingdammit— "mess with your hair?"

"Little bit. Besides, I trust you."

Don snorted at that and took another swing. Right down the center.

"Nice," Charlie said. There was a pad beside him, and he scribbled on it occasionally, recording the data, the way he liked to do.

"I'd do better without you breathing down my neck. Go get us something to eat or something."

"I'm fine," Charlie said, like Don had been the one offering him food. "Look out," he said, as the machine shot out another one, a heavy, dangerous low and outside, with plenty of spin.

"Swing," Charlie said, and the bat connected.


End file.
